. But the dodo would be its first bird, which is significant as it means changing the gene editing technique to accommodate an external egg.. With the mammalian species the technique requires implanting gene-editing material into the reproductive system of an existing relative of the species, such as an elephant in the case of the mammoth. It could take many pregnancies in practice to create viable offspring from such a method.
But this will also be technically challenging, as no one has yet managed to use gene-editing for birds in this way. She said there were hundreds of dodos in collections around the world, meaning it had been possible to sequence the dead bird’s genome. But she warned that the revived dodo could never be an exact replacement for what has been made extinct. “What we are trying to do is to isolate the genes that distinguish the dodo,” she said. “It would be crazy to think the solution [to the world’s biodiversity crisis] was to bring back a proxy.
“We are very transparent that [the place] to reintroduce the dodo into the wild would be Mauritius,” he said.
Or spend $150 million on currently threatened species.